GUEST EDITORIAL: Corker offers practical plan for highways

So, on Wednesday, he and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., proposed a new funding mechanism for the federal Highway Trust Fund that’s practical but controversial.

The proposal would fund transportation projects at current spending levels for the next 10 years and add buying power as well. The controversial part is that it would raise federal gasoline and diesel taxes by 6 cents per gallon in each of the next two years and then index the gas taxes to inflation, using the Consumer Price Index, to ensure the fund remains viable into the future.

To offset the taxes, he would permanently extend some of the tax provisions in the tax extenders bill currently stuck in the Senate. Among those provisions is one that allows taxpayers who itemize their deductions to claim state and local general sales taxes. This is a big boon for taxpapers in states such as Tennessee that don’t have a state income tax.

The offset, he said, would allow Republicans to avoid violating Americans for Tax Reform’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge. The proposal, Murphy said, has the backing of labor unions and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Corker said the proposal is better than the current “game of chicken” that’s played in Congress every year when “a gimmick” is proposed to fund the Highway Trust Fund.

The gasoline and diesel taxes were last raised in 1993.

Although the proposal could be acted upon this summer, he said, a controversial bill with long-term solutions is more likely to be taken up after the November elections when it might be dealt with “in an appropriate and mature way.”

So for the next fiscal year, Corker said, Congress will “do the cowardly thing” and “throw kids under the bus one more time” to fund the Highway Trust Fund. Three times since 2008, he said, that has meant transferring more than $50 billion of general fund dollars into the highway fund and getting the government further from a pay-as-you-go transportation funding model.

The current bill before the Senate would finance two years’ worth of costs over as many as 10 years and would still leave the Highway Trust Fund insolvent.

A better model for the country, Corker said, is the road system in Tennessee, which he said “has not one penny of road debt” and boasts the second best roads in America.

Outside of returning to a pay-as-you-go formula or continuing the same borrowing on the backs of future generations, he said, the only other solution is to stop road projects “and become a weaker and weaker and weaker nation.”

Corker is right to say the proposal will be controversial. At the end of the first two years, a gallon of gasoline at today’s $3.21 cost (at one random station) would cost $3.33. So a 15-gallon fill-up would rise from $48.15 to $49.95. But your extra $1.80 per fill-up would help build and save the nation’s roads.

That amount is a reasonable solution if he and Murphy can get the Senate, the House and President Obama to go along with permanent tax breaks.

Without the corresponding tax breaks, the gasoline tax rise is what it is, a sensible funding formula for the Highway Trust Fund but a tax increase nonetheless.